On the 10th November Boycott Workfare West Midlands will be holding a demonstration at so called charity British Heart Foundation on Harborne High Street. British Heart Foundation are one of the largest charities making use of forced labour under the Mandatory Work Scheme. Join in from 11.30 am at British Heart Foundation, 159 High Street Harborne, Birmingham, West Midlands B17 9QE. More info at: http://www.facebook.com/events/500424336644051/

If you can’t make Birmingham then don’t forget to tweet British Heart Foundation to demand they pay their workers and pull out of all workfare schemes @thebhf

Please help share, tweet and help spread the word about all events. Feel free to post details of any other anti-workfare action taking place in the comments.

Boycott Workfare are today calling on people to contact the exploitative companies using tax payer funded forced labour on the Government’s various workfare schemes.

Three companies have been singled out for attention, all of whom will no doubt be familiar to readers of this blog.

Argos, Savers and Poundland are all involved in using workfare. They also all have lots of customers on benefits. Boycott the bastards. But in the meantime contact them and complain about their use of unpaid workers.

This is based on the claim that 46% of people referred onto the Government’s Mandatory Work Activity scheme (MWA) – a system of community service for unemployed people – sign off before starting the scheme or fail to turn up and have benefits sanctioned.

MWA is used should a Jobcentre advisor decide someone isn’t trying hard enough to find work. It consists of 4 weeks unpaid work, similar to a medium level Community Payback sentence. Job Seekers are now being treated in the same way as those who may have committed burglary, Actual Bodily Harm, or sexual offences, the only difference being the unemployed don’t get the benefit of a trial.

Claimants are sent to work for charity shops and ‘community organisations’. Many of these charities are household names, such as the British Heart Foundation (@thebhf), who’s charity shops are fast becoming little more than punishment centres for the unemployed. Other charities have lied through their teeth about their involvement in forced labour. Charity SCOPE (@scope) are adamant that not one of the volunteers in their shops are there under threat of benefit sanctions. Yet in a recent press release on the DWP’s own website, a case study is outlined in which someone was sent on Mandatory Work Activity in a SCOPE charity shop. Failure to attend MWA can lead to benefits being sanctioned for three months.

It is quite possible that many of those who signed off after being sent on MWA, or failed to attend the scheme, represent people who are not well enough to work full time, or were not fully aware of the consequences. These are not people who have been working on the side, but people who have simply been forced out of the benefits system into poverty and quite possibly homelessness.

Grayling himself appears to admit that some of them signed back on when they thought the coast was clear. This is not the behaviour of someone committing fraud. Yet this hasn’t stopped the minister and his friends at the Daily Mail of attempting to smear almost a million unemployed people as criminals.

As ever in amongst Grayling’s slurs and spin he can’t resist an outright lie. Grayling claims in the Mail today that:

“‘I sat through an interview with a young man in a job centre who was working for a few hours a week, below the benefit threshold, at a local nightclub,’

The benefit threshold is £5 a week. Either Grayling doesn’t have a clue about the basics of how the benefit system actually works. Or he is making shit up again to please the braying hounds at the Daily Mail. Compulsive liar Grayling has moved so far from the truth it is impossible to believe anything that he, or the DWP, tell us anymore.

70,000 claimants are now to face MWA under changes announced yesterday. It now seems certain that those who refuse to attend workfare on the Work Programme, or Work Experience schemes, will be sent on MWA instead. When the workfare row blew up earlier in the year Grayling announced that sanctions would no longer be applied to young people who didn’t want to take part in Work Experience and face being sent to sleep under a bridge with no access to food or toilet facilities.

It is now clear that Grayling’s claims were a deliberate attempt to mislead the business community, charities and the public alike. Sanctions have been snuck back into the scheme under another guise as soon as the minister thinks the public have forgotten. If you refuse ‘voluntary’ workfare, then you will be sent on ‘mandatory’ workfare or face sanctions potentially lasting up three years.

The pressure needs to be maintained. There is little point directing protests at the DWP or Chris Grayling who can’t even be trusted to tell us the truth about what is going on in the benefits system. Workfare exploiters should be confronted directly. It matters little what crazy schemes Grayling comes up with next if companies and charities realise involvement in forced labour is far from profitable. If they exploit us, we will shut them down.

Follow Blog via Email

The growth of zero hours contracts is making it even harder for disabled workers to secure the reasonable adjustments they need to do their jobs, “valuable” new research suggests. Employers are displaying a “strong reluctance” to make reasonable adjustments for … Continue reading →

[with thanks to Tony Collins and Campaign for Change for permission to repost] Capita’s share price has fallen to a new 10-year low today (8 December 2016) after chief executive Andy Parker warned that “near-term headwinds” would hit trading performance in the first half of 2017. The company’s share price of 513p at lunchtime today was 9%… Continue Reading C […]

Devastation writes, SERIOUSLY BAD NEWS Sharp readers will remember the plan announced in 2015 to shrink the “estate” of the DWP by 20% over the next few years. Well, here are some examples of this move in Glasgow – where a whopping HALF of all Jobcentres will close!!!!!! This is devastating news, because thousands of […]

Report by CJ6.30PM-8.30PM Monday 21st Nov 2016 Unite Housing Workers and Social Housing Residents meeting. Only 6 people including CJ and Tim B. Discussed problems with social housing providers for workers and tenants, so in both our interests to get together. Another meeting pencilled in for 30thJan 2017. Nice coffees and luxury biscuits.Noon-1.15pm Weds 23 […]

Today, Netpol supporters received our November 2016 newsletter in their email in-boxes. It is now also available online here. If you would like to receive future email updates, sign up to Netpol’s ‘announcements’ list here. We would also like to ask for your help: if you think the work we undertake is important and worth … The post Read our November 2016 new […]